Automatic cleaning of combustion air ports in chemical recovery boilers is well established since Anthony-Ross Company pioneered the industry in the early 1980s. Refer to U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,423,533 and 4,822,428, held by Anthony-Ross Company. The disclosures of these patents are incorporated herein by reference. Since the introduction of these mechanisms in the 1980s, the worldwide pulp and paper industry has adopted automatic port cleaning in large scale and Anthony-Ross Company enjoys over 70% market share. During the intervening period, Anthony-Ross Company has worked continuously to refine and perfect the “index cleaning” mechanism first described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,822,428. This method of automatic port cleaning has proven to be very effective and robust and the current refined mechanism contains essentially all of the elements of the original “indexing APC”. The current mechanism contains a single linear actuator (typically a pneumatic cylinder) that drives multiple cleaning rods (up to eight rods), each rod fitted with a cleaning tip, and each cleaning a single port. Therefore there is a cleaning rod and tip for every port on the boiler. Typically there may be upwards of one hundred primary air ports on a recovery boiler. In the current embodiment, each rod/tip is positioned in front of a corresponding air port, and each rod extends out of the windbox where it engages the automatic port cleaner (APC) mechanism. This arrangement has several advantages: Each rod has its own support bearings therefore the bearing loads are reduced; each rod can be adjusted relative to the port opening from outside the furnace; in the event a tip becomes stuck in the port opening, the individual rod can be loosened from the mechanism simplifying the retrieval process; there is very little obstruction of the ports inside the windbox; and the number of expensive actuators is reduced. All of these features have proven advantageous by the reliability and effectiveness of the mechanism. While the worldwide market overwhelmingly considers the Anthony-Ross APC as the “gold standard”, there is still room for improvement.